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Domain received previous boogieman letter

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A couple years back, a name appeared on drop that seemed too good to be true. I won't elaborate the exact name itself, but just to give a texturally accurate hypothetical example, lets call it "paypalalternative / cm".

The domain consisted of two words that had aggressive PPC competition, it was a well aged reg prior to drop, had plenty of bullseye searches for that exact term, plus, the business in question had a generally growing discontent amongst it's captive market share meaning a nice uptrending search pattern. It was the sort of domain that once dev'd, should monetize very well in a PPC format.

Grabbed the domain and forgot about it. Recently, in doing some research getting ready for dev'ing it, I see that the previous owner of said domain had received a boogieman letter from the company in question threatening a TM action, thus causing him to allow it to drop. I'm not worried about boogieman emails from companies with totally delusional TM spectrums; I get one from Yahoo about once every couple years and tell them to piss off accordingly... but I'd rather avoid litigation for a site that won't earn enough to defend itself.

If I were to do a site that carefully listed the various "paypal alternatives", reviews of such, etc, then add an adwords sort of deal, does anyone see a legitimate TM issue with this?
 
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If your going to monetize the site, then its a clear violation of TM. This is blatant.
 
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Especially if it's "uniquely famous".
 
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From a site:

The fair use defense if it is to be successful must meet the following requirements: (1) the author's use of the mark must accurately describe the trademark owner's product or service; (2) the author must use the mark in a non-trademark manner and not as a source identifier of the author's work; and (3) the author's use must be in good faith.

The problem in that is section 2. Not sure if you can get away with that in a fair-use setup where the domain name could be considered the source identifier.
 
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If your going to monetize the site, then its a clear violation of TM. This is blatant.

What if it weren't monetized?
 
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If it's not for a commercial purpose you stand a good chance of keeping it imho. That might not prevent them from approaching you though but certainly you have a better case for fair-use.
 
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